A Simple Guide to the Scrum Development Process

Unless you have been working in the tech scene, you may not be familiar with Scrum. In fact, just last week a friend of mine told me about a funny title one of her co-workers had as the “Scrum master.” Although it sounds like the way you would describe a good meal, Scrum is actually anAgile development process and framework that developers have been using for years to maximize efficiency and create remarkable products.

However, for those who are out of the loop, the Scrum development process seems like another language. In order to help you better understand exactly what Scrum is, how it works, and how it can benefit your business, we have set out to create a simple guide to the Scrum development process.

Our hope is that once you have read our short guide, you will know how to run your own Scrum development and see the results for yourself. Now enough talking about it, let’s get into it.

The purpose

For those who are just starting out in the Agile development world, it can be difficult to understand the purpose of having different frameworks and processes. To understand the purpose of the Scrum development process, you first need to understand the purpose of Agile development.

Agile development is based on values such as collaboration, self-organization, and cross-functionality of teams. Scrum is simply the framework by which you can achieve the goals of Agile development. Your purpose then with a Scrum development is to work together with your team to create an end product that meets the needs of not only your developers and your company, but your end-users.

The “Whos” of the Scrum development process

Now that you know the purpose of the Scrum development process, let’s talk about the “Whos.” No, I don’t mean the dystopian civilization from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, I am referring to the different roles within Scrum that your team will need to play.

Product owner: Scrum begins with the product owner whose job it is to represent the final user’s best interest. It is the product owners job to help sort the backlog (more on that in a minute) and decide what does and doesn’t go into the final product.

Scrum master: The Scrum Master is the servant-leader of the Scrum development process. While they have no authority over decisions, they do have authority over the process and making sure things like theScrum planning meeting go according to plan.

Scrum team: It is the job of the Scrum team to bring various specialties to the table and work together toward a common goal. Typically, these teams need to be smaller in size for maximized efficiency, so if you have a larger project, work with multiple teams instead of creating too large of a team.

Additionally, there will be different stakeholders and outside voices that might add to the Scrum development process, but for the purposes of running a successful development, these three roles will be your main crew.

The backlog

Once you have decided the various roles for your team, the next step is to layout and prioritize the backlog. This is where you work together to name everything that will need to be done on the project and then rank it by importance. While facilitated by the product owner, this process should involve everyone to make sure that the needs of the team are met, not just the needs of one person.

A key insight to remember about the backlog is that it will forever be a work in progress. This is one of the hallmarks of the Scrum development process. With other projects where everything is laid out at the beginning, much can be lost to the rigidity of that system. By continuously adding to the backlog, your project will develop into exactly the product that your end-users want and deserve.

The Sprint

Now comes the fun part of the Scrum development process: The Sprint. Sprints are short time periods where the Scrum team selects a group of tasks off of the backlog to complete. While Sprints can be anywhere from 1-4 weeks, the most important part of the Sprint is knocking out items from the backlog at a quick rate to make room for the next group of tasks.

Over the course of the Sprint, your team will have Daily Scrum Meetings in order to make sure that everyone is on track. These meetings have a time-limit of 15 minutes, so make sure that everyone is ready to answer the following questions before you begin:

What did you work on yesterday?

What will you work on today?

Is there anything impeding you from accomplishing your daily tasks?

When it comes to the Android oriPhone app development process, having these daily Scrum meetings will ensure that everything that needs to be done gets accomplished.

The retrospective

Once your team has completed their first Sprint, it is now time to see what worked and what didn’t. This is what we call the retrospective. In the retrospective, the team reviews the previous Sprint and takes a hard look at the process to help plan for future sprints.

Although your team might want to celebrate finishing the first Sprint, it is vital that you take the retrospective seriously. Scrum and Agile development are built upon being iterative and improving with each Sprint. Unless you have good notes from your retrospective that you actually apply, you are likely to simply repeat past mistakes.

Repeat

Now that you have completed your first Sprint, you have gone through and learned the key features of the Scrum development process. Now, it is time to do it all over again.

Don’t fret! As your team continues to improve with multiple iterations, you will only become more and more efficient. As you become more efficient, you will have more time to work on other projects or simply enjoy your free time.

Not only that, but as the Scrum development process increases in potency, you can add in more advanced techniques to get the most out of it. But, more on that later. For now, get out there and start developing!